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He took his perverse pleasure from the 23-year-old York University student, after she’d cried out “No, No.” Pushing into her basement apartment, pushing her to the floor. Half a world away, Liu’s ex-boyfriend watched helplessly on a monitor — the two of them tethered by technology — as the assault began and then as the attacker, naked from the waist down, approached his victim’s computer and turned it off.

Qian Liu's parents clutch a photo of their daughter outside the University Ave. courthouse where Brian Dickson, 32, was convicted of first-degree murder in the York University student's death on Monday.
(Vince Talotta / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

On Monday, after a mere four hours of deliberation, a jury decided it didn’t need to see or hear what was missing from the evidence. They’d seen and heard quite enough over the scant six days of trial: Guilty of first-degree murder.

That means the jury believed Dickson, now 32, intentionally killed Liu around 1 a.m. on April 15, 2011, in the course of sexual assault, though pathologists — one thoroughly convinced, another slightly less sure — on the definitive cause of death. Mechanical asphyxiation, three specialists called to the stand had concluded, to varying degrees of certainty.

Dickson’s lawyer, Robert Nuttall, had argued for manslaughter. Yes, he said, his client had committed a monstrous act by sexually assaulting Liu — ejaculating on her flesh because no semen was found inside her mouth or genitals. But the killing was an unintended consequence of Liu’s resistance, of sitting on her chest while “sexually excited” and Liu’s neck cricked against the wall.

The jury wasn’t having any of it.

And they didn’t even know what the Crown had been unable to tell them, the full picture of Dickson’s depravity that was drawn during his January 2012 bail hearing, covered by a publication ban until Monday’s verdict: That he advocated having sex with children on online message boards; that he’d purportedly made sexual advances on another young woman who lived in Liu’s student rooming house — Dickson was a resident there too, on the ground floor; that he’d allegedly forced a woman he’d met at a nightclub in 2006 to have sexual intercourse and when she told him to stop he told her to “Shut the f--- up,” continuing for another 20 minutes — that prompted a sexual assault charge, later withdrawn by the Crown; that a former girlfriend accused him of choking her and shoving two fingers down her throat after he’d been caught stealing money from her bank account to buy cocaine; that pornography — about half of it involving Asians and a quarter involving teenagers — had been found by police in his room; that, on message boards, he’d championed having sex with girls as soon as they hit puberty, writing that he’d “encourage” incest and exposing his own children to “lots of porn and oral.”

“As for actual incest,” he said in one posting, according to the testimony of Toronto Det.-Sgt. Frank Skubic, “I do encourage it . . . but only after they begin to develop.”

Of course, creeps can say anything in the virtual world of online shamelessness. But in the real world, in real time, Dickson was caught in the act of violating and killing. And though those images haven’t been retrieved, though Xian Meng in distant Beijing saw only the start of the outward edges of the assault — Liu opening the door to a man who’d knocked, Liu trying to push him back out, Liu’s twitching feet on the floor as she collapsed beyond the computer camera’s range — he was able to provide for the jury a vivid account of what he’d witnessed, the heavy breathing he’d heard, the sound of keys jingling maybe, and two muffled bangs before “I heard no more sound from Qian Liu.”

Ontario Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy had told the jury they should have no difficulty finding that the man Meng saw was indeed Dickson.

The petite Liu, an overseas student, had been chatting with Meng via Skype and the Chinese version of MSN late that night, reaching out in loneliness to her former boyfriend — they’d been together since middle school — as she did her homework. When somebody knocked, Liu rose from the computer and spoke with a man through the door, then opened it. There was a brief exchange. Liu handed the man one of her two cellphones. She clearly wanted him to leave at that point but he would not, ignoring her pleas in Mandarin and English.

It was Meng who, horrified, went into a chatroom Liu used, sending out entreaties to anybody who might know her address so that they could summon police. A response didn’t arrive until the following morning, when the superintendant of the building, just south of the York campus, was finally reached. He and another tenant found Liu’s nearly naked lifeless body, face-down on the floor.

Dickson became a suspect early in the investigation and gave a statement to police in which he admitted having been inside Liu’s apartment, briefly, on another occasion and seeing her in the building’s basement kitchen on the night of April 14. He denied having embraced her, kissed her, or killing her.

Detectives conducting surveillance on Dickson were later able to retrieve two discarded cigarette butts from which DNA was obtained. The genetic fingerprint was then matched to swab samples taken from Liu’s body. Dickson was a match — to a probability of one in 25 trillion — with DNA from the breast swab; to a probability of one in 2.7 quintillion with the semen swab from Liu’s abdomen. Female DNA taken from a bloodstain on a T-shirt police seized from Dickson’s apartment matched Liu to a probability of one in 140 quadrillion.

Before the trial began, in front of the jury panel, Nuttall tried to enter a plea of manslaughter. It was rejected out of hand by the prosecution. You can see why.

Liu’s parents watched the trial from one side of the University Ave. courtroom, Dickson’s parents from the other.

Liu’s father, who’d been stoic throughout, wiped tears from his eyes when the outcome was delivered.

Nuttall said no decision has been made yet on whether Dickson will appeal but indicated his client had accepted the verdict.

“Mr. Dickson has always had his eyes wide open.”

Eyes open, case closed.

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